Use the make-sqldeveloper-package to convert the ZIP file into a DEB package

I used the make-sqldeveloper-package, which is available for Debian and Ubuntu and it’s derivatives. However, the man page and the instructions are little unclear on how to use it. You need to download the zip file available at Oracle’s (and not the RPM file nor any of the other packages) and then use the make-sqldeveloper-package to convert it to a DEB which you can then install using the dpkg command.

This is preferable to using rpm or alien as you can more easily manage the package using Debian’s and Ubuntu package management tools, plus it will integrate SQL Developer into Gnome’s Menu System . Plus, when Oracle updates their version you can use make-sqldeveloper-package to create an updated DEB package and easily update the version you have installed. The procedure outlined below works on Ubuntu Karmic and should also work on any Debian version that has the make-sqldeveloper-package.

Post navigation

I got an error when running make-sqldeveloper-package, complaining that I didn’t have dos2unix installed. dos2unix isn’t available through apt-get, but I was able to find the package: tofrodos. This package installs: fromdos. Link that to dos2unix and it works. Here are the commands:

Thanks for the comment Saulustiano, I was wondering if this would still build on the latest versions of Ubuntu. I build SQLDev a few years ago and I’ve been upgrading my system a few times and SQLDev still works for me without me having to reinstall.

Great instructions! Unfortunately, the current make-sqldeveloper-package script didn’t work with sqldeveloper-3.1.07.42-no-jre. I did some searching and found this patch: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/ source/sqldeveloper-package/ bug/985810. Applying the patch made it work.

sudo apt-get install sqldeveloper-package on LMDE gave me this version:

Here’s the patch to which Jim refers. It’s needed to address the issue mentioned by Henrik above.

Apply it to directly to the make-sqldeveloper-package script (ver. 0.2.3) , which for me could be found under /usr/bin, by replacing line 381 with the patch revision which adds an additional grep in order to identify the missing chmod options.

The Ubuntu forum for bug #985810 contains additional details but this was enough to get me going.

make-sqldeveloper-package: Building sqldeveloper package in “/home/administrator”.
dpkg-checkbuilddeps: Unmet build dependencies: debhelper (>= 7)
debuild: fatal error at line 1312:
You do not appear to have all build dependencies properly met.
You can use mk-build-deps to generate a dummy package which
Depends on all the required packages, or you can install them
manually using dpkg or apt using the error messages just above
this message.
administrator@ubuntu11:~$

Just FYI, leaving an update since I posted about the bug earlier. All is working with the latest release. I just installed sqldeveloper-3.2.20.09.87-no-jre.zip on Ubuntu 13.04 with no issues. It just worked!